the Fourth Week after Easter
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Daily Devotionals
Day by Day Devotional - Year 3 of 5
Jeremiah 17:1-11
In order to bring home to a man’s conscience his condition as an habitual sinner, God uses different pictures in His Word: the example of the people of Israel and their moral bankruptcy; the gift of the holy law; the perfect life of Christ here below (showing up by contrast the wickedness of man); finally, as here, plain and irrefutable statements. V. 9 affirms that the heart is basically perverse and incorrigible: "deceitful above all things and desperately wicked." This judgment must be engraved deeply in our thinking. We shall thus be kept from putting even the least confidence in these poor hearts — ours no less than those of others — and we shall then spare ourselves many disappointments. Rather let us adopt v. 7: "Blessed is the man that trusteth in the LORD", with the happy outcome of this (cf. v. 8 with Psalms 1:3). His thirst quenched at the inexhaustible spring, such a man fears neither heat nor drought; he scarcely notices them. "Rooted . . . in Him" (Colossians 2:7), he has no fear and does not cease to bear fruit for God. He experiences indeed the condition referred to by the Lord Jesus: "He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing" (John 15:5).
